In my day job as a retoucher for a magazine company I do my fair share in creating the ideal life that advertisers would hope people would want to spend money trying to achieve. I don’t carry what I do lightly and I do hold some level of responsibility for playing a role in shaping peoples’ ideas of themselves and the quality of their lifestyles. Honestly, traveling to Southeast Asia was in part an attempt to compensate for what I do for a living. It is in some respects an attempt to reduce my “Capitalist Footprint.” What I realize is much of the sex trafficking problem and many of the problems that plague our word today all stem from our inability to properly answer the question “How should we then live?”
The American dream was at one time all about having a good job, a home, a safe place to raise a family, a decent retirement. Now, it has simply disolved into abstract concepts like being famous, being rich, having more. Our society has lost all understanding of the word enough. It has led to our economic crisis and worse than that it has infected much of the world as well. So as I walked down the streets in Bangkok I couldn’t help but see how this place was born out of our desires to live this idealized lifestyle. You can live the extravagant life, you can get the girl, you can feel powerful and important…all for pennies on the dollar. Look at this image for example…
All the men are accompanied by young beautiful girls who are ready to address any desire they may have. The girls are groomed to play into the fantasy. This is the new dream…this is the life we’ve been advertised. But what is the real cost? Is this really how we should be living?
In my travels all I really saw was the most obvious of the sex trade industry and it was quite disturbing. What keeps me awake at night is knowing that what I witnessed is the most tame and merely the tip of the iceberg of a multi-billion dollar industry. The above sign initially struck me as funny. I appreciated the truth in the advertising.
But the real truth lies in how the young women above got to where they are today. The story of their journey from their village to standing outside the bar attempting to entice men inside. Even more, I am curious the life the unborn child will live.
For myself, I want to rediscover the meaning of enough. I want to go back over these and dig deeper and tell the story more completely. I want live the kind of dream that does not harm others in the process. I want to live in a way that helps others rather than distorting our understanding what a successful life looks like.
I don’t really know where I am going with this, just needed to get it off my chest.
pg
